


The Huntress

by LosttotheHoping



Series: Kage no Monogatari [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 02:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LosttotheHoping/pseuds/LosttotheHoping
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But it was then that she had forced herself to kill off the last of her innocence, and become the killer that Hidan had already been trying to make her.  There had been no other way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Huntress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azhwi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azhwi/gifts).



> Another confession… I hope this inspires more fans of this pairing. I really do adore it, and so does my beta and bestest friend in the world, Azhwi. Thank you for taking the time to read, and please review!!

They’re running through the forest.  Hidan is laughing beside her, and Akatsuki is hot on their heels.  Itachi’s been dead for two months already, his brother a new member, but the boy has little interest in Hinata or Hidan specifically.  No, it’s the mission they stole from Akatsuki that he’s interested in.  And the scroll that the contact hired Akatsuki to get.

But Hidan is really interested in this scroll.  He’s told Hinata that it’s a scroll placed on Earth by Jashin.  Hidden from the other gods, so that they cannot destroy Jashin and take his place of power.  He’d been so animated the night before, when he’d outlined to her just how they were going to steal the scroll out from under Akatsuki’s nose.

Hinata wasn’t really that surprised when they stumbled upon the redheaded girl – Karin or something like that – and Uchiha Sasuke.  She had distracted the two while Hidan snatched the scroll, and then the two of them took off.

“Hi-na-ta!” Hidan sing-songed, grinning widely with excitement.  “You’re faster!  Take the scroll to the rendezvous point!”

She grabs it from him as he starts to slow.  “Alright!” she replies, knowing what he has in mind.  He’s going to sacrifice Uchiha Sasuke and the girl to Jashin.  Some part of her is a little troubled by the thought, but it’s easy for her to shrug it off.  After all, Sasuke-san had betrayed Konoha long before she’d ever had the notion.  Now?  There just isn’t a single thing they have in common.

So she moves on, leaving her lover behind to fight against the others without any concern for him.

xXx

An hour later, as she lazes about in a familiar swamp, she starts to wonder what’s taking him.  But she isn’t worried.  She thinks back to a time when she would have been, and immediately recalls her incarceration in Konoha.  Then, she would have worried.  Then, she would have cared.

But it was then that she had forced herself to kill off the last of her innocence, and become the killer that Hidan had already been trying to make her.  There had been no other way.

xXx

_Finally, Ibiki came for her.  He brought her to a room with no windows, and drab, uninteresting cement walls.  There was a single wooden door with steel hinges and no handle; it opened only when chakra was applied._

_There were two chairs, and that was all for furnishings.  He took one, she took the other, and she was strapped into it.  “Hyuuga Hinata.”  When she said nothing, he frowned.  “You can probably imagine why we are here.”_

_Hinata could only stare at him.  This was Konoha’s torture expert, the interrogation man that got his hands on the worst of criminals and made them squeal like stuck pigs.  This man was a legend, the kind that ninja mommies and daddies used to scare their children into behaving._

_And she was terrified.  He was going to kill her over and over because he didn’t need to worry about her dying.  He’d do it until she screamed the answers he wanted, but she was pretty sure she had no answers to give him._

_“What can you tell us about the Jashin religion?”_

_That wasn’t the question she’d expected him to ask.  She had expected demands about Akatsuki, their hide-outs, their tactics, their plans.  Not about her Jashin, the god that had granted her forever with the man she loves.  She just stared at him, unable to come up with a single thing to say.  Truthfully, she wouldn’t even know where to start._

_Ibiki continued after the silence settled and threatened to cling.  “Does it have a weakness?  Can we kill Jashinists in some way?  Hinata, if you tell us what we need to know, we’re willing to give you a complete pardon, and reinstate you as a ninja of Konoha-”_

_“You want to kill Hidan.”  The words were out of her mouth before she was even fully aware of thinking them.  They were impulsive and reckless, but she didn’t take them back.  She didn’t want to._

_The man before her did not show any change of expression.  He did, however, pause for the briefest of moments, long enough to re-evaluate the situation.  Finally, he nodded.  “Yes.  He is an enemy of Konoha, and if we can find a way to kill him, then it would be to our advantage.  Hinata, is there a way?”_

_“No,” she told him truthfully, and then went on with, “Jashin-sama has granted him true immortality, as a priest of the order.  He is the highest authority on Jashinism on Earth, and the most powerful.  Even now, I bet Jashin-sama is pulling him back together piece by piece.”  Most of it wasn’t true, of course.  While Hidan_ _**was** a priest for Jashin, one of the few capable of inducting people into the religion, the rest of it was pure fiction.  Well except of course that Hidan couldn’t be killed._

_This wasn’t the answer Ibiki had been looking for, obviously.  But he nodded anyway.  “What about you?  Supposedly, you survived falling from a cliff…  We were aware that you’d been partnered with Hidan and the man Kakuzu.  We are aware that you are said to be practicing that religion…  Will you give it up to come back?”_

_“No.”  Truth again, and her fingers were clenching at the chair hard enough that she knew her nails would leave marks.  “I will not.  And I will not tell you anything else.”  She would have no fear, even in the face of the most terrifying man she’d ever met._

_He must have seen it in her eyes, because he nodded and got up.  Shortly after that, she was escorted back to her cell, and left on her own._

_Ibiki questioned her again the next week, without gaining another bit of information.  They tried two more times before it became obvious that she would not willingly give any weakness._

_Then the torture started._

xXx

Hinata isn’t really surprised when the redhead finally finds her.  The girl is muddy and cranky and there’s a leech on her arm that she’s trying to pull off.  But the girl is good with sensing chakra, and when the leech comes free, she throws it into Hinata’s face.

The Jashinist woman ducks and dances away.  She smiles at the girl, who complains at her about having to follow Hinata into this ‘godforsaken jungle of mud and mosquitoes’.  She talks too much, and Hinata thinks she’s awfully shallow.  She bitches about every single damn thing that crosses her mind, and in no time at all, the Jashinist knows all about her infatuation with Sasuke.

While she works through a plan to get Karin’s blood, she’s quiet.  Very quiet, and it’s starting to unnerve the redhead, who’s had to abandon her glasses because she couldn’t see through the mud on them.  (When she complains about it, Hinata offers the thought of contacts, but this just seems to piss Karin off.)

Her chance comes, while Karin attacks her with kunai and rants about someone named Juuga (Juugo?) and forest animals.  Hinata slips in under her guard, and slices her stomach, flipping away.  Karin curses, and Hinata pauses on a tree branch to lick the blood.  Then she taunts the girl, riling her up with ease, and leads her on a wild goose chase to a relatively dry piece of land.

Karin calls her gross, until she takes in the Jashinist’s face and body.  Hinata tosses off the heavy woolen cloak she’s been wearing, brown in color.  It thuds to the ground behind her, revealing her mesh undershirt and standard issue ninja shorts.  And black and white all over her body, a vague outline of her skeleton.

She creates the circle, smiling at the stunned redhead.  Karin doesn’t last long at all after that.

xXx

_Hinata didn’t tell them a single thing.  She screamed through the torture, prayed for deliverance, but she kept her mouth shut.  Jashin hasn’t come to her in her dreams again, and she was afraid that it was because she’d not been able to complete the ritual in a while._

_It was after one particularly brutal torture session that Ibiki knelt before her again.  She was laying on the floor, her blood staining the cement, breaths coming quick and sharp.  The part of her that felt any camaraderie to this man, any loyalty, has been stabbed to death over and over.  At this point, she wouldn’t mind if he died.  In fact, she planned on it._

_“Hinata, I hate doing this,” he told her, sad and sympathetic,_ _**pitying** her like some sort of helpless child._

_But the cuffs were still off, because they always took the cuffs off right before she ‘died’.  They learned the first time, when her death throes destroyed the links, that it was best that way.  She’s almost done drawing the circle in her own blood._

_“Th-then…”  She coughed when her own blood in her mouth went down the wrong tube.  “Wh-why…?”_

_“Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll stop,” he said instead of answering, and he held his hand out to her.  “Come on, Hinata.  Tell me, and I can bring you back home, where you will be safe and warm and fed.  You’ll be happy again.”_

_She took his hand, let him pull her up as if she was finally giving in.  Her feet lost purchase on the floor, and she stumbled into him, but he straightened her, steadied her.  Then she bit down hard on his wrist, enough that her blunt teeth broke through the skin and she tasted his blood.  He backhanded her away, right onto the circle as she’d counted on.  “Fuck,” he hissed, staggering back.  He looked up at her, and she could see the blood drain from his face._

_Hinata bared her teeth at him, and dragged herself to her feet.  She held up a kunai, stolen off of him when he’d helped her up.  He took a step, and she slit her own throat.  They both thudded to the ground._

xXx

Hinata finally just goes back for Hidan.  When she finds him, it’s to him cursing as Uchiha Sasuke systematically cuts him to pieces.  The female sighs loudly, Byakugan activating as she closes her eyes.  Sasuke has noticed her, and he abandons Hidan in favor of the bigger threat she presents.

“Where is Karin?” he demands.

She gives an offhanded shrug, chakra clinging to the tree branch, allowing her to hang from it upside down.  Her hair is a waterfall beneath her, her cloak slipping off to join the marsh-water below, and she lets it.  “Dead,” she tells him.  “She wasn’t much of a challenge.  Do you always pick such weak partners?”

He darts toward her, and she lets the chakra release, landing in a quasi-handstand only to pivot her weight into a two-legged kick aimed for his chest.  Predictably, he grabs her ankles and spins her around, but she lets him.  He throws her, and she lets him do that too, catching herself effortlessly on a tree branch as she passes above it.  She shifts her momentum into an arc, using the branch to redirect her direction, before releasing herself and landing beside Hidan’s head.

“Are you okay?” she asks him.

“Do I fuckin’ look like I’m okay?  Don’t ask stupid questions, bitch,” he retorts, which really just means that it hurts and he loves it but he’s definitely being a baby about it.

“Do you have the scroll?” Sasuke demands of her.

She reaches into the satchel on her thigh, retrieving the dummy scroll they’d prepared beforehand.  “You gonna take it and leave?  We were double booked, and I’m not interested in fighting you, Uchiha.”

“I’ll leave if you give it to me,” he agrees.

So she makes a show of reluctantly tossing it at him, and Hidan makes a show of getting really pissed about it.  Uchiha eyes it briefly, nods, and takes off to find his partner.

xXx

_For a moment, Hinata could only stare at the man twitching on the floor.  He was in a puddle of blood – his own – eyes open and staring, but unseeing.  His body slowly went still, and she finally forced herself to blink.  Drew in a breath, and with it the stench of death._

_She could feel Jashin’s pleasure with the sacrifice.  But she ignored it and looked around.  She couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a second._

_No one has come yet.  She glanced around, but there’s no one rushing to the man’s rescue.  Didn’t they hear him die?  But no, she’d seen the thickness of those walls…_

_She got up, stumbling with pain as the death wound on her throat healed itself.  Still silence, but that wouldn’t last.  She could get more gear later, but right now she just wanted to leave._

_She opened the door, and somewhere down the hall, an ANBU turned toward the noise.  She was already darting forward, and her stolen kunai buried itself in his throat.  He gagged quietly, and she gently let him sink to the floor.  Pulled out the kunai.  Fled._

_The next two were Genma and Choji.  She got Genma first, a wound in his side that may or may not kill him.  Then Choji finished gaping at her and lunged, arm growing.  She used her quicker speed to duck under it, and moved upward.  “I’m sorry, Choji,” she whispered, and buried the kunai in the dip between shoulder and neck.  He cried out and fell, bucking._

_She left him behind quickly, knowing it was important that she get out of here before the real showy nin started to appear.  Down the halls she ran, taking out two more unfamiliar ANBU, getting a shurriken stuck in her wrist.  She stole a tanto from some man without a face, and someone else’s weapons pouch.  They were custom made, diamond-encrusted black steel._

_Friend and foe had no meaning anymore.  There were faces that were familiar, but her heart was locked away in her chest.  She forced herself to take them down until she stood in the forest, Shino and Kiba and Kurenai blocking the way._

_“Hinata, what are you doing?” Kiba asked, looking heartbroken, but she just stared at him.  A part of her realized that the numbness spreading through her bones might never leave, but perhaps that would be okay in the end.  No more hurting._

_Kurenai saw more of it than her students, and her voice was sad as she spoke.  “Hinata-chan…  Please stop.  Please come back, don’t make us…”  But Hinata only looked at her, and she sighed.  “She won’t.”_

_Shino attacked without another word.  He darted forward, bugs swarming.  Hinata dropped back into a stance, gaze sharpening.  There was only one way to save herself from his attack.  Only one, and she started to spin._

xXx

The scroll contains a technique.  A way to command the corpses of their victims in order to kill more.  Hidan turns his nose up at it, so Hinata takes it and studies it.  She realizes it is just a further control of what they already use.  Their victims do not disconnect from them after death.  They disconnect after the symbol is no longer in play.  Meaning, as long as the Jashinist remains on the symbol, they can control the corpse of the dead.

“I’ll have to find someone to test this on,” she comments later that night.

Beside her, finishing the stitches on his left arm, Hidan just grunts in derision.  His mouth is full of a coarse-textured roll of bandages, but he manages a quiet, “Not me,” anyway.

She blinks down at him, pale eyes flickering over the jumble of stitches all over his body.  “No,” she agrees bemusedly.  “I wouldn’t.”

Eyes like blood lift briefly to meet hers, then lower to his tending once more.  “No, you wouldn’t,” he confirms.  Because no matter how much she’s changed since the day she woke up with Deidara in her face, she will still never, ever harm a comrade.  Or him.

Hinata sighs and kneels in front of him.  Normally, he’d bitch and moan about her helping him, but when she takes the thread and needle away, he says nothing.  He watches her with not a word while gentle fingers carefully pull the skin together, locking it in place so that he will heal when all is said and done.

“Hinata.”  His voice is a breath, and she looks up, knotting the last stitch.  He reaches out and drags her into a steamy kiss that steals her breath and makes her his all at once.  Rough, calloused hands yank her into his lap, avoiding injury and pinning her in place.  His mouth moves from hers, teeth scraping the tender column of her throat when he seals it there.

She can feel his intent firmly, the desire to claim, to brand, to advertise that she is his and no one else’s.  The woman arcs back, head thrown back, jaw fallen open.  Helpless moans begin when he slides his hand beneath her shirt, fingers uncaring for gentle, wanting just the opposite.

She’s his, she belongs to him in every way; body, soul, heart, mind.  Perhaps it should scare her, perhaps she should run from it, but she won’t.  He’s made her, created her from almost nothing until she is the woman that purrs at a tiny flash of pain; Hinata is his huntress, bred from the finest stock to the worst outcome.

And she won’t have it any other way.

xXx

_Hinata ran from them, distracted them from pursuit with her presumed death.  She made it to Hidan and dug him up, and she ran.  When they discovered this, she and Hidan were already halfway to Kumo._

_She finally had to stop when she couldn’t go on without crying anymore.  She found a cave, she sobbed as she helped him put himself together, and then she retreated into the furthest corner of the cave.  He didn’t come to console her, and she hadn’t expected him to._

_She couldn’t feel anything but remorse so intense she wanted to throw up.  She hated that she’d fought them, that Choji and Genma may have died at her hand.  That Ibiki **did**_   _die.  It was a bitter, horrid taste in her mouth, and she was finally forced to empty her stomach._

_Part of her was dying then, dying a slow and horrible death, and the best she could do was cling to what she_ _**had**.  That was Hidan, and Jashin, and the blood on her hands.  Her ability as a ninja and a Hyuuga to kill.  Her obligation as a Jashinist to spill blood over the ground._

_The sobs gradually petered out, sorrow giving in to emptiness.  When she pulled herself to her feet, she felt nothing.  It mattered just as much as it mattered for her to lay on the ground still, and that was to say it mattered not at all._

_Hidan opened his eyes as she knelt in front of him.  He cracked a grin at her.  “Done bein’ a baby?”_

_She smiled back.  “For now.”_

xXx

When Hinata’s eyes open some time later, she just lays in his arms and thinks about all the things she’s given up.  Mortality, friends, family, the chance at having children.  Perhaps the only thing she still mourns is the last, because Jashin will not permit breeding and so the moment they lost their ability to die, they lost the ability to conceive.

Perhaps it’s for the best, she tells herself.  If Jashinists could breed, well… There would probably be little Hidans peppered all over the brothels.

The thought makes her giggle, stirring her lover.  He drags her against his chest, but doesn’t bother wasting the effort to turn her to face him.  His nose nuzzles the back of her neck, prompting her eyes to close.

“See?” he murmurs after a long moment.

She shrugs awkwardly, smiling.  “My eyes are closed.”

He actually chokes at that, and his teeth sink lightly into the muscles of her shoulder.  “Dummy.”  He kisses the spot and goes back to cuddling.  “I meant…  You make a good Jashinist.  I told you so, didn’t I?”

Hinata doesn’t tell him why she became a Jashinist in the first place, or why she went through with it all in the end.  She’s never told him, and she never will.  She doesn’t even know if he loves her back, or knows for what reasons she agrees with his sudden assessment.

She twists around, pearl meeting ruby, and smiles at him.  “You’re such an egotistical bastard,” she replies sweetly.  “I bet you think it’s all about you.”

“Oh it is, sexy, it is,” he retorts cheekily.

“Blasphemer.”

The look on his face is worth it.

_~Owari_

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Characters and Naruto do not belong to me, but to Masashi Kishimoto. I am responsible for creating the situation, and the storyline only. Please do not take and use without my express permission. Thank you.


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